Performance Statistics

The questions will inevitably arise: How does Fossil perform?
Does it use a lot of disk space or bandwidth? Is it scalable?

In an attempt to answers these questions, this report looks at five
projects that use fossil for configuration management and examines how
well they are working. The following table is a summary of the results.
Explanation and analysis follows the table.

Project

Number Of Artifacts

Number Of Check-ins

Project Duration(as of 2009-08-23)

Average Check-ins Per Day

Uncompressed Size

Repository Size

Compression Ratio

Clone Bandwidth

SQLite

28643

6755

3373 days9.24 yrs

2.00

1.27 GB

35.4 MB

35:1

982 KB up12.4 MB down

Fossil

4981

1272

764 days2.1 yrs

1.66

144 MB

8.74 MB

16:1

128 KB up4.49 MB down

SLT

2062

67

266 days

0.25

1.76 GB

147 MB

11:1

1.1 MB up141 MB down

TH3

1999

429

331 days

1.30

70.5 MB

6.3 MB

11:1

55 KB up4.66 MB down

SQLite Docs

1787

444

650 days1.78 yrs

0.68

43 MB

4.9 MB

8:1

46 KB up3.35 MB down

The Five Projects

The five projects listed above were chosen because they have been in
existance for a long time (relative to the age of fossil) or because
they have larges amounts of content. The most important project using
fossil is SQLite. Fossil itself
is built on top of SQLite and so obviously SQLite has to predate fossil.
SQLite was originally versioned using CVS, but recently the entire 9-year
and 320-MB CVS history of SQLite was converted over to Fossil. This is
an important datapoint because it demonstrates fossil's ability to manage
a significant and long-running project.
The next-longest running fossil project is fossil itself, at 2.1 years.
The documentation for SQLite
(identified above as "SQLite Docs") was split off of the main SQLite
source tree and into its own fossil repository about 1.75 years ago.
The "SQL Logic Test" or "SLT" project is a massive
collection of SQL statements and their output used to compare the
processing of SQLite against MySQL, PostgreSQL, Microsoft SQL Server,
and Oracle.
Finally "TH3" is a proprietary set of test cases for SQLite used to give
100% branch test coverage of SQLite on embedded platforms. All projects
except for TH3 are open-source.

Measured Attributes

In fossil, every version of every file, every wiki page, every change to
every ticket, and every check-in is a separate "artifact". One way to
think of a fossil project is as a bag of artifacts. Of course, there is
a lot more than this going on in fossil. Many of the artifacts have meaning
and are related to other artifacts. But at a low level (for example when
synchronizing two instances of the same project) the only thing that matters
is the unordered collection of artifacts. In fact, one of the key
characteristics of fossil is that the entire project history can be
reconstructed simply by scanning the artifacts in an arbitrary order.

The number of check-ins is the number of times that the "commit" command
has been run. A single check-in might change a 3 or 4 files, or it might
change several dozen different files. Regardless of the number of files
changed, it still only counts as one check-in.

The "Uncompressed Size" is the total size of all the artifacts within
the fossil repository assuming they were all uncompressed and stored
separately on the disk. Fossil makes use of delta compression between related
versions of the same file, and then uses zlib compression on the resulting
deltas. The total resulting repository size is shown after the uncompressed
size.

On the right end of the table, we show the "Clone Bandwidth". This is the
total number of bytes sent from client to server ("uplink") and from server
back to client ("downlink") in order to clone a repository. These byte counts
include HTTP protocol overhead.

In the table and throughout this article,
"GB" means gigabytes (109 bytes)
not gibibytes
(230 bytes). Similarly, "MB" and "KB"
means megabytes and kilobytes, not mebibytes and kibibytes.

Analysis And Supplimental Data

Perhaps the two most interesting datapoints in the above table are SQLite
and SLT. SQLite is a long-running project with long revision chains.
Some of the files in SQLite have been edited close to a thousand times.
Each of these edits is stored as a delta, and hence the SQLite project
gets excellent 35:1 compression. SLT, on the other hand, consists of
many large (megabyte-sized) SQL scripts that have one or maybe two
versions. There is very little delta compression occurring and so the
overall repository compression ratio is much lower. Note also that
quite a bit more bandwidth is required to clone SLT than SQLite.

For the first nine years of its development, SQLite was versioned by CVS.
The resulting CVS repository measured over 320MB in size. So, the
developers were
pleasently surprised to see that this entire project could be cloned in
fossil using only about 13MB of network traffic. The "sync" protocol
used by fossil has turned out to be surprisingly efficient. A typical
check-in on SQLite might use 3 or 4KB of network bandwidth total. Hardly
worth measuring. The sync protocol is efficient enough that, once cloned,
fossil could easily be used over a dial-up connection.